Scholarly Publishing as an Archaeological Practice

No nine year old comes home from school and announces “I want to be a publisher when I grow up.” Doctors, yes. Archaeologists too. But publishers?

I won’t give you my “how I became a publisher instead of an archaeologist” story. It has to do with the grad student blues in Ann Arbor, an invitation from an uncle who was squeaking by in his small publishing business, and the hope that I could find a job that was like being a grad student but where they paid you rather than you paying them. I found one as an intern at Sage Publications in Los Angeles. Now, almost four decades later, I have had the opportunity to work for many years at a highly successful academic press (Sage) and start two of my own (AltaMira Press and my current one, Left Coast). I’ve been responsible for publishing well over 1,000 books and for starting or acquiring about 50 journals (Figs. 1–2).

I would have been a lousy archaeologist.

The Upside and Downside

If you are a graduate student or young professional looking for an alternative career in archaeology to that of a university professor, could publishing be a potential career for you? There are a number of attractive features to this career path.

• • You don’t need to finish your PhD. You will never have to speak with your dissertation advisor again, nor will you take the language test in Greek or Akkadian.

• • Everyone else in publishing is overeducated and underpaid too.

• • After a while, they let you use your brain.

• • Working with ideas is more interesting than selling soap or insurance.

• • You get to read what you want, rather than what is assigned, and can tell the writer what to change if you don’t like what you read.

• • The atmosphere is usually informal; business suits for either sex are a rarity.

• • It’s an international industry including annual trips to the Frankfurt Book Fair.

• • Skills are generally transferrable from one publishing house to another.

• • Any skill you have, and anything you’ve ever learned, will come in use somehow.

The last item is the one that requires the most explanation. Publishers are professional dilettantes. Contrary to the traditional scholar who is an expert in a specialized area, publishing encourages you to know a little about a lot of things. You don’t need an expert’s knowledge, just enough to be a receptive audience to someone trying to describe their book to you or to write 100 words of advertising copy about it. The one undergraduate class I took in African history became incredibly valuable when I launched a major book series on the archaeology of Africa. At some point, so did my interest in folkloric dance, my high school French classes, my travels to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and everything else I ever learned.

As a dilettante, I can sound authoritative for a few minutes on ground penetrating radar, Middle Stone Age lithics, or the link between heritage and tourism. But don’t ask me to lecture in front of your class on any of them. Like Jeopardy contestants, publishers are better at asking questions than providing answers.

Fig 1.

If you like to read, scholarly publishing is not much different than being a scholar except in its variety.

(Courtesy of M. Allen.)

There are, though, significant downsides to this career shift.

• • The pay sucks. That’s true of adjunct instructors too. But eventually many get to a reasonable academic salary. That works in some parts of publishing, but people who work in copyediting, design, proofreading, or distribution, for example, will never become rich.

• • It is a career shift and beginning anew will be a shock. Even if you brandish your PhD, you might only be offered an internship at minimum wage to start. Teaching six courses at five universities might sound more attractive in this context.

• • There are few epiphanal moments. For all that archaeologists talk about the importance of the context of what they find, there really are days when you discover...